www.bournemouth.ac.

uk



What I learned from 1,000,000
tweets about Bournemouth

Dr. Nigel L. Williams
Senior Lecturer Project Management
Principal Investigator Festival Impact Monitor
Nwilliams@bournemouth.ac.uk
@BUFestim

www.bournemouth.ac.uk
Overview
Why use twitter?
Twitter compared to other platforms
Twitter as a public space
Research
Practice
How to use Twitter
Dos and Donts
Next Steps
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Why use Twitter?
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What is twitter?
A microblogging service (limit of 140 characters
per tweet)
Relationships do not require reciprocation. A
user can follow any other user, and the user
being followed need not follow back.
Twitter posts are called tweets
Common practice of responding to a tweet
RT stands for retweet,
@ followed by a user identier address the user
# followed by a word represents a hashtag
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Twitter as a public space
Structural characteristics
Friend Follower relationships
Lists
Hashtags
Content of interactions
Similar to how individuals meet in real life
Amount of personal information revealed
Enough to know that you are dealing with a
person

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Whats in a Tweet?
Common perception is that tweets only
contain text

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Whats in a tweet
However, twitter contains far more than
text.
The following pages show all of the data
available in twitter
Adapted from:
http://citizenshift.org/blogs/betweenthelines/2012/12/19/2012-map-
of-a-twitter-status-object-for-dummies/

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Whats in a Tweet?
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Whats in a Tweet?
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Twitter for Research
Google Scholar Search: 4,300,000 articles
about Twitter vs 4,200,000 on Facebook
Why do researchers like twitter?
A complete archive of interactions
Profile data
Location data
Time data

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Twitter for Research
Has been used in research on:
Disaster recovery
Flu tracking (Sadilek et al 2012)
Marketing
Politics
Events
Destination

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General Twitter Usage
Breaking news
Activism
Customer complaints
Promotion

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Breaking News
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Activism
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Promotion
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Complaints
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Getting more out of
Twitter
Usual Advice (Bufferapp.com):
1. Post great content
2. Write a professional bio
3. Use hashtags
4. Place a widget on your website/blog
5. Engage with others
6. Make sure your content is shareable ( photos, videos)
7. Reshare other peoples content
8. Reach out to influencers
9. Stay active
10. Follow other users

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Dos
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Dos
Be an Informer
Benefits (Naaman, 2010)
Higher number of followers
30 times the amount of Retweets (Hutto et
al. 2013)
Higher online reach

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Donts
Avoid (Kwak, 2011):
Many updates within a short time
Posting about uninteresting topics
Sharing the mundane details of your life

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What else is twitter good
for?
Good place to experiment with campaigns:
Ask for photos
Ask to tweet with geotags
Ask for hashtag promotions
Twitter polls
Good for getting the pulse of the
profession
Indicator of what is happening in the
private areas of social networks

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Conclusion
Twitter has characteristics that make it
useful for research and practice
Sample (biased) of current discourse on a
range of topics
Platform for experimenting with social
campaigns
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Further Reading
http://citizenshift.org/blogs/betweenthelines/2012/12/19/2012-map-of-a-twitter-status-
object-for-dummies/
https://leveragenewagemedia.com/blog/social-media-infographic/
http://blog.bufferapp.com/category/social-media-tips
Hutto, C. J., Yardi, S., & Gilbert, E. (2013, April). A longitudinal study of follow
predictors on twitter. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in
Computing Systems (pp. 821-830). ACM.
Kwak, H., Lee, C., Park, H., & Moon, S. (2010, April). What is Twitter, a social
network or a news media?. In Proceedings of the 19th international conference on
World wide web (pp. 591-600). ACM.
Kwak, H., Chun, H., & Moon, S. (2011, May). Fragile online relationship: a first look at
unfollow dynamics in twitter. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human
Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1091-1100). ACM.
Naaman, M., Boase, J., & Lai, C. H. (2010, February). Is it really about me?: message
content in social awareness streams. In Proceedings of the 2010 ACM conference on
Computer supported cooperative work (pp. 189-192).
Sadilek, A., Kautz, H. A., & Silenzio, V. (2012, July). Predicting Disease Transmission
from Geo-Tagged Micro-Blog Data. In AAAI..